Microsoft

Microsoft Is Shutting Down Mixer, Moving Streaming To Facebook

Microsoft announced today that the company will be shutting down its streaming site Mixer on July 22 and will partner with Facebook Gaming moving forward. The shutdown starts today, with a transition plan laid out by Microsoft for Mixer streamers. Mixer Partners will be granted partner status with Facebook Gaming, and the platform will honor…

What We Still Don’t Know About PlayStation 5 And Xbox Series X

Today saw Sony officially unveil the PlayStation 5. Microsoft revealed the Xbox Series X last December. And while we already have quite enough to argue about between design choices and technical specs, there are still a few important things we don’t know about this upcoming pair of game consoles. The biggest mystery surrounding the PlayStation…

Killer Instinct Documentary Reveals Surprising Connection to Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Fighting game community documentarian Esteban Martinez of Hold Back to Block returned this week with a full-length look at the history of Killer Instinct, focusing on its 2013 reboot. Surprisingly, the celebrated competitive fighting games actually has roots in licensed fare like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Green Lantern Double Helix Games was one of…

Game Companies Say They’re Supporting Black Lives Matter, But Few Are Offering Specifics

As protests over the killing of George Floyd by police spread throughout the country last weekend, some of the gaming industry’s biggest companies put out statements in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. But while a few have shared some specifics about what they’re doing to help fight systemic racism, almost none of them…

Xbox Series X Backwards Compatible Games Will Support Quick Resume Feature And HDR, Microsoft Says

Microsoft explained some of the ways the Xbox Series X will play older games even better than the hardware they were originally created for in a blog post this morning. “Not only should gamers be able to play all of these games from the past, but they should play better than ever before,” Jason Ronald,…

No Man’s Sky Coming To Xbox Game Pass And Windows PC In June

The procedurally-generated universe of Hello Games’ sci-fi epic is getting a massive influx of new explorers next month, as No Man’s Sky joins the Xbox Game Pass subscription service and scores a new Windows PC version. In the nearly four years since its August 2016 release, No Man’s Sky’s has evolved from a relatively bare-bones…

Minecraft Dungeons Is A Fun But Stripped-Down Dungeon Brawler

I’ve spent a few hours clicking through Minecraft Dungeons’ isometric world and, despite how shallow it feels, I’d be content to click through it for several more. Mojang’s attempt to spin its massively popular crafting game into a small Diablo-like is successful, limited only by the narrow ambitions underlying it. Minecraft Dungeons, out May 26…

Minecraft Maker Mojang Is Now Mojang Studios

The studio that built Minecraft is now many studios around the world, working on multiple games and projects. So, on the occasion of the studio’s 11th birthday, Mojang is now officially named Mojang Studios, with a fancy new logo and everything. When video game developer Markus Persson released Minecraft on May 17, 2009, he used…

Epic And Microsoft Aren’t Saying Whether That Unreal PS5 Demo Can Run On Xbox Series X [UPDATE]

Epic Games’ impressive Unreal 5 tech demo revealed earlier this week was running on a PS5 development kit. Whether it can also run on Xbox Series X remains a mystery. “The demo we revealed [on Wednesday] is running on PS5 because that’s been our target platform for this particular experience,” a spokesperson for Epic told…

The Xbox Series X Has 60 FPS As ‘Standard’, But It’s Not Guaranteed

After Ubisoft confirmed today that Assassin’s Creed Valhalla will run on the Xbox Series X at a minimum of only 30 frames-per-second, people are wondering what they can expect from Microsoft’s new gaming console. The answer is not constant 60 fps gaming. “Developers always have flexibility in how they use the power, so a standard…

Sony Copies Microsoft, Creates New PlayStation Studios Brand

Today Sony announced a new name for its first-party games: PlayStation Studios. PlayStation Studios will consist of Sony’s internal studios like Naughty Dog, Insomniac Games, and Santa Monica Studio. The news was announced alongside a video of a new opening cinematic that will play before each PlayStation Studios game starts on your console. It shows…

Everything Microsoft Showed During Today’s Xbox Series X Event

Microsoft finally showed its next-gen Xbox Series X in action today during a special edition of Inside Xbox featuring a slew of trailers for upcoming games, including Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Dirt 5, and Yakuza: Like a Dragon Over a dozen games were shown during the roughly hour-long event and while many of them were from…

This Is What Xbox Series X Graphics Look Like

Here’s what Playism’s Bright Memory: Infinite looks like running on the Xbox Series X, or at least in-game footage representative of Xbox Series X performance. Not too shabby. The first game shown during Microsoft’s Xbox Series X gameplay reveal event was this first-person shooter from developer FYQD-Studio. Note that the official stream version carried a…

Watch The Xbox Series X Gameplay Reveal Live Right Here

This morning Microsoft is giving us our first look at next-generation gameplay on the Xbox Series X, including Assassin’s Creed Valhalla in action. Let’s watch. It should be an interesting show, full of footage from games looking slightly to significantly better than they would on standard Xbox One hardware. Many of the games coming to…

Microsoft Will Show Xbox Series X First-Party Games In July, Still Promising Halo For Launch

Microsoft says it plans to show updates on its first-party games some time in July and is still planning on launching Xbox Series X and Halo Infinite later this year. The company shed more light on its plans for the rest of 2020 in a blog post today, including announcing a series of “monthly moments”…

Xbox Series X Gameplay Reveal Set For May 7

Microsoft will finally show gameplay from Xbox Series X games, including our first look at Assassin’s Creed Valhalla in action, on a new episode of Inside Xbox airing May 7. While Microsoft has already shown the console itself, as well as shared deep dives into its specs, this will be the first opportunity to see…

Game Pass now has over 10 million subscribers. Xbox boss Phil Spencer announced the stat in a new blog post outlining the downloadable game service’s continued growth. That’s up from 9.5 million monthly users last year. Spencer said subscribers are playing games twice as much since the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic. 

Sea of Thieves Bug Causes Ships To Pull Sick Flips

This is the Tony Hawk x Sea of Thieves crossover nobody asked for. For a little while now, Sea of Thieves has had a bug that takes previously regular sailing ships, comfortable in their designed space on top of the water, and launches them suddenly into the sky like Poseidon hit a comically large EJECT…

Red Dead Redemption 2 Comes To Game Pass

Red Dead Redemption 2 goes free to download as part of Xbox Game Pass starting May 7. The blockbuster western, which former Kotaku editor Kirk Hamilton called “exhaustively detailed and exhaustingly beautiful” in his review, is the latest in a series of big games that have recently come to Microsoft’s subscription-based download library. The Witcher…

This Cyberpunk 2077 Xbox Is Too Much

Happy Friday: this special edition Xbox One X comes with glow-in-the-dark graffiti that says “No Future.” It’s probably right. I wasn’t down with this Cyberpunk 2077 Xbox One X when it leaked on the Canadian Walmart website yesterday. Instead of something bright and neon-fueled, it looked to me like the sort of colorful scrap metal…